In Senegal, floods displace more than 56,000 people in the east of the country

“Time stopped on October 12 at 10:30 am”says Samba Gadiaga, frozen in the middle of his devastated property. In Ballou, like in twenty other villages in the Bakel department in eastern Senegal, it was like a long, slow tidal wave. Nearly 56,000 people lost their homes and land, often both at the same time, according to an official report presented on October 31 and still provisional. Hundreds of thousands of hectares were covered by water and still are.

The damage is concentrated on a strip of land hundreds of kilometers long on the left bank of the Senegal River. A dike was quickly built in the large coastal city of Saint-Louis to try to prevent flooding, as the floods continued to advance northeastwards, below the Senegal plain or the agricultural regions of Matam and Podor, also heavily affected. .

From the roof that became Noah’s ark for forty-four children, Samba Gadiaga remembers those ten days in which the carts floated and the donkeys had disappeared from the streets; Canoes were then needed to obtain supplies. Today, this farmer dressed in a blue boubou can only contemplate his rice fields devastated by the waters of the Falémé, one of the tributaries of the Senegal River.

Houses collapsed like houses of cards

“This succession of flood peaks, between the end of August and mid-October, saturated the soil, says Andrew Ogilvie, a hydrology researcher at the Montpellier Development Research Institute. The Senegal River basin could no longer absorb anything. It is not the violence of urban flooding in the Valencian Community [qui ont fait plus de 200 morts en Espagne]but the effect is catastrophic for hundreds of thousands of Senegalese who live on this land.”.

After these torrential rains at the end of the season – one of the effects of global warming – the power of the Senegal River increased tenfold due to water releases at the saturated Manantali Dam, one of its tributaries in Mali. The watercourse abandoned its channel and the laterite footprints became inaccessible. Electricity towers, telephone relay antennas, grocery stores, farm machinery, schools and thousands of houses made of pew (a material made of clay and straw) were damaged or, more often, collapsed like castles. of cards.

Help was organized very quickly: volunteers, neighbors, Bakel canoeists, companies and even residents of Dakar, 700 kilometers away, were mobilized and numerous solidarity caravans were launched. Thus, a greater number of victims was avoided, although a 7-year-old girl was found drowned in Kidira, on the border with Mali. The State has not remained inactive, but, if today it tries to manage aid, its awakening was late and still insufficient: only eight large tents were installed for refugees on October 18, that is, six days after the catastrophe, according to an official document. consulted by the world.

Three weeks after the start of the floods, astonishment and the feeling of abandonment were still widely shared in this strip of land bordering Mauritania and Mali. Met on Wednesday, October 30, an elderly man in a red keffiyeh was sitting in the courtyard of a town hall whose roof had been blown off, waiting for two hours for an unlikely renewal of his civil status certificate.

Bassirou Diomaye Faye’s visit criticized

After the exceptional aid of the first days, the mobilization of the authorities fights to alleviate needs. “I would need 3 million CFA francs [4 596 euros], or the work of several years, to rebuild”explains, palette in hand, Boubacar Marega, alone, in front of his ruined house. The Senegalese government promised on October 16 to release 12 million euros, but this seems insufficient given the magnitude of the projects.

Worse still, the arrival on October 19 of the Head of State, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, dressed in uniform and wearing dark glasses, fueled the anger of the victims by going only to the two relocation sites and not to the places where the inhabitants were the most affected. In Golmy, the epicenter of the catastrophe, Ahmed Traoré’s bitterness multiplied tenfold after his meeting with the president. “I told him that it is a shame to live so isolated, said the retiree from a hypermarket in France, returning to his hometown to spend, he thought, a few quiet days. His attitude is incomprehensible, “It only remained on dry land, to quickly depart by helicopter and fly only over the flooded areas.”

Cheikhna Camara, mayor of the neighboring town of Ballou, also does not hide his anger towards the new authorities – “null and incapable” – and criticizes his lack of anticipation. “During the inter-ministerial meeting on August 26, I told the Prime Minister [Ousmane Sonko] that the alert level had been exceeded and that the Orsec plan had to be activatedsays Camara, invited to the meeting as vice president of the association of mayors of Senegal. But nothing was done! The lights were red and they looked elsewhere.”

For now, he and all his neighbors continue cleaning, clearing, scrubbing what can be scrubbed, while the specter of a health disaster looms. In the backwaters that occupy half the village of Golmy, donkeys graze on the mud of an open landfill mixed with stagnant water. The floods covered freshwater wells and no order was issued to prohibit their consumption or domestic use.

“We have lost the sense of danger”

“Bleach tablets to disinfect water” They were distributed, says Yassine Gueye, head of nursing. In what quantity? The data provided by the Bakel prefecture does not specify this. Only “about ten cases of diarrhea” were registered by the only caregiver per 10,000 inhabitants. “Without being alarming, these are weak signals that we monitor “, said.

Firefighters, sent to the scene, had not yet pumped; on October 31, thousands of hectares were still flooded, increasing the risk of spreading diseases such as cholera. Aware of the risk, the prefect of Bakel believes that the “80,000 liters of drinking water” sent from the first days made it possible to avoid a catastrophe of completely different dimensions for the 35,000 most affected victims.

Trapped by the waters, the inhabitants now see their future hindered in these lands marked by decades of drought, another effect of global warming. “Unlike the 1974 floods [qui avaient fait moins de dégâts], we have lost the sense of danger when building in flood zones, underlines Boubou Lasana Camara, head of the Golmy village. It was a fatal mistake. » In Golmy and Ballou, the upper parts, built before the 1970s, were preserved. Perched on a mountain, built with the sweat and blood of thousands of forced laborers in the 19th century.^my Since the 19th century, the colonial fort of Bakel, today occupied by the prefect, has never been threatened by floods.